^{BoneDaddy's Best Books of 2005}

The lists, the lists, we love the lists. Best movies, best TV, best music, best books, best mug shots, best lists. I have neither the money nor the time to properly participate, but I will anyway. I've got my best books of the year collected - speaking figuratively since I've returned most of them to the library - and I'm ready to go.

Except I want to start with a best of TV. TV would be completely unbearable without Lost, Arrested Development and The Daily Show. That's that. The number of they got away with that? moments on Arrested Development rivals the long lost prime of The Simpsons. Anyone catch it when the father, escaping from custody at the Church-State fair, had to choose between the Popemobile and a Humvee and "decided to take the one that was armored?"

Tom Tomorrow used to do a regular joke where he'd talk about a scandal and then say something along the lines of "And if you didn't know that, isn't it a shame you had to learn it from a talking penguin in a cartoon?" One of the reasons The Daily Show is so good is that the rest of the media is so bad. In 2005 (and 2004), it's not shameful at all to get much of your news from a comedy source. Fact is, The Daily Show consistently did better analysis of the news than the rest of the media. My comedy bit of the year is Ed Helms reacting with shock and concern over how badly Katrina devestated ... the president's image. The BoneDaddy household expanded our cable so we could keep watching The Daily Show.

My books for 2005 are a little more obscure. Also, these aren't all 2005 books. I just happened to read them in 2005, or at least I think I did.

The Getaway /Bad Boy. Jim Thompson. I'm pairing these because I read them back to back. Simply put, I will never forget the experience of reading The Getaway. This book doesn't descend into an amoral wasteland of violence and degredation. It starts there and goes downhill. My jaw literally dropped at the ending of The Getaway, which would be notable by itself except the ending of Thompson's Savage Night hit me the same way. My jaw doesn't drop easily so for one author to get a twofer says something. The Getaway concerns a heist gone bad. The two guys involved pursue each other across America to Mexico, girlfriends in tow, running across things you expect in pulp fiction and things you don't. A giant pile of shit figures in at one point. I'm not sure why anyone considered these books harmful. The Getaway is a scared straight program in print.

Bad Boy is Thompson's autobiography, taking him up to adulthood. It's startling to realize someone so associated with mean streets and noir urban toughness was raised rural and dirt poor. No indoor plumbling, which was really tough on alcoholics. You wouldn't know it from the movies, but Kansas City was the city for much of Thompson's life (and fiction for that matter). I would call Bad Boy a major work of American literature, a near-masterpiece depicting early 20th Century poverty, desperation and self-invention, something that could be put next to any great American autobiography ... except I suspect most of it isn't true. What do you do with an autobiography that isn't true? Well, you can enjoy it anway. (And if it is true, Thompson lead one of the strangest lives of any author and keep in mind, Bad Boy only takes him to his 20s or so.)

I got The Getaway and Bad Boy from e-bay. What a score. They came with The Ripoff and The Golden Gizmo. I read them in that order, which by chance worked out to best to worst.

The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks. Susan Casey. This one was published in 2005. The Farallon Islands are less than 30 miles away from San Francisco and yet are one of the most cruel, monstrous and inhospitable places on Earth. The islands are a wildlife bird sanctuary. Also, the seals love it and with the seals come the sharks. Migrating great white sharks return to the Farallons every year and two of the biologists out there for the birds started documenting the shark behavior. Casey became obsessed with these islands and these sharks and talked her way into the restricted area. If you've enjoyed any of the recent extreme elements-type books, like Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, you should check this out. You can almost feel the wind and the rocks, and sense the sharks. Her chapter about the history of the islands, which were once "owned" by an egg harvesting company and the site of some violence of the human kind, proves again that American history is stranger than Americans are generally willing to accept. Her chapter on the ghost stories gave me a good old fashioned nightmare. I'm a veteran of many a Shark Week, and I learned a few things from this book.

I have only one complaint with The Devil's Teeth. Casey does become quite obsessed with these islands. Someone else pays the price for her obsession and I ended the book pretty convinced there was more to the story. The very last section of the book feels incomplete and dodgy as a result.

102 Minutes. What a miserable list I'm compiling. Violence, death and tragedy. At first glance, this book looks at best like a bit of sensationalistic reporting and at worst like bloody-shirt waving. It's actually a simple attempt to describe what happened at the World Trade Center between the first plane and the second collapse. People keep telling us what 9/11 means and what it justifies, so it's important to remember what it was and what happened. If you're interested in the entire history of the buildings, including 9/11, I still recommend City in the Sky by James Glanz and Eric Lipton.

The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House. John Harris. Why not? I seem to be tilting to a non-ficiton list this year. This account, by the White House correspondant for The Washington Post, chronicles Clinton's two terms. Harris contends that Clinton thrived under pressure and attack, and that he was best in a chaotic environment. Possibly recognizing this, Clinton often surrounded himself with forceful, dichotomous elements - think Lloyd Bensen and Robert Reich or George Stephanopolous and Dick Morris - and tried to pull the best out of the ensuing arguments. The book is pretty straightforward, getting back cover blurbs from both Fox News and objective sources like David Mariniss (author of the far more personal Clinton biography First in his Class). Harris eventually concludes that Clinton is slightly shy of the upper echelon of American presidents, both because he never had to face a true national crisis and because he was unable to force a happy, oblivious American public to face the potential problem of terrorism.

The postscript about terrorism will probably infuriate those conservatives who still read outside the powerline-townhall sludge. It depicts a lame duck president, attempting to highlight the potential of terrorism to an indifferent public and incoming Bush administration. Of course, as the public, we had an excuse: it's not our job to worry about terrorism, especially when one of our own American political parties had just attempted a coup. Harris doesn't let Clinton off the hook though. A truly great president, he maintains, could force the republic to confront issues that initially seem far off and Clinton failed to do this.

Harris ultimately reveals his reporting roots. The Survivor is straightforward in every sense of the word. A chronological account of Clinton's two terms. It lacks the depth of great history and with such a broad focus it lacks the intensity and consistent surprises of a more narrowly focused book, for example Robert Reich's Locked in the Cabinet or Jeffrey Toobin's A Vast Conspiracy. Still, a solid read.

Okay, forget about obscure ... Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling. The expectations and hype would have melted pretty much any book. Rowling managed to age the characters once again and deepen the plot in a way that didn't just introduce new elements but showed us new things about old elements. And speaking of surprises, I doubt the identity of the person who dies was a shock to many people, yet Rowling still made it moving and, well, surprising. It sets up the final installment perfectly in that I want it now.

Not a bad year at all.